LAUSR

The previous issue of the International Review of Applied Economics (Volume 32, Number 4) published the latest analysis from the ‘European Memorandum’ (or EuroMemo) Group on the current problems of the European economy and what policy action might be appropriate for tackling these problems. In this issue we publish a paper with many synergies to that previous analysis and prognosis, namely Jörg Bibow’s analysis of ‘How Germany’s anti-Keynesianism has brought Europe to its knees’, which goes far deeper than simply critiquing the austerity policies of the past few years, or the draconian measures imposed on Greece: Bibow takes a longer view, investigating the lack of any lasting impact of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory on economic understanding and policy-making in Germany. Bibow’s analysis highlights the interplay between economic history and the history of ideas in shaping policy-making in postwar (West) Germany, arguing that Germany learned the wrong lessons from its own history, and misread the true sources of its postwar success. Monetary mythology and the Bundesbank, with its distinctive antiinflationary bias, feature prominently in this collective odyssey. Bibow argues that the crisis of the euro today is largely the consequence of this long-standing and peculiar anti-Keynesianism in Germany: